ESSEX BRICKS 245
heated until the constituents of the clay fuse partially (technically
known as "sintering") to give that characteristic porous, strong,
yet brittle texture, which I can describe only as "brick-like".
Of course, present-day industry is not satisfied to make bricks
as they have been made for several thousand years (in this coun-
try, since Roman times) and all kinds of tricks and dodges of
modern science are used to hasten the traditionally slow processes
of weathering, preparing, and drying the clay. But we are con-
cerned here with the antiquarian aspect of bricks and I shall
assume you understand me to be speaking of processes in general
use down to about 1850, and in small brickfields or for special
purposes, even now not quite extinct.
Of the traditional processes, then, there are two methods of
shaping the prepared, plastic clay. The first, and earlier, was to
spread and roll the mass on sand or sometimes straw, strewn on
level ground, and to cut up the sheet of clay into pieces of the de-
sired size. This is much like the cook's process of making a sheet
of pastry. You can imagine that after separating the pieces a little
with bats, like butterpats, the margins of the cut edges would
thicken, and it seems that Roman brick was made like this.
Possibly also the earliest East Anglian brickmakers after the
Norman Conquest followed the same practice, but it is certain
that quite soon afterwards the second or box-moulding method
was employed, perhaps introduced from Flanders by refugees.
In this second method, a wooden board had nailed to it a piece
of hard wood of the length and breadth of the brick and perhaps
half an inch thick: this was the "stock". A wooden frame without
top or bottom was made to fit over the stock and the depth of the
frame would be the thickness of the brick plus the thickness of the
stock.
The brickmaker scattered a little sand on to the stock, placed
the frame over it and flung a "clot" of clay into the frame. He
rammed the plastic clay to fill the mould, struck off the surplus
with a flat piece of wetted wood or stretched wire, and removed
the frame. Then he, or his boy, carefully lifted the formed clay on to
a carrying-board or "pallet" and behold—a brick, in shape at least.
At the very beginning of nineteenth century mechanisation,
about 1860, another kind of process was introduced and I must
refer to it because its use necessarily excludes one characteristic
feature of many bricks. If you imagine a tube having a rectangular
open end with the dimensions of the breadth and thickness of a
brick, and plastic clay being squeezed out from the tube-like
toothpaste, you will see that when a length equal to the desired
length of a brick had been extruded, it could be cut off with a
stretched wire (like a cheese-cutter) and so bricks called "wire-
cuts" can be formed by this continuous process. Of the other, still